Pamela Woolner

Pam has a background in school teaching, but she has been researching educational environments for nearly two decades. She works with school communities to understand their use of their spaces, enabling her to develop an overview of the potential for school premises to support change and improvement.

Her work, bridging architecture, education and visual mediation methods, is unusual and she has been invited to provide expert input into projects and discussions regionally, nationally and internationally levels. Outputs have included an influential review, The Impact of School Environments (2005), a book for school users (the Design of Learning Spaces, 2010) and an interdisciplinary edited collection, School Design Together (2015) about participatory design of school space.

Her recent collaboration with the Council of Europe Development bank (CEB), Constructing Education (2021), proposes a framework to guide collaborative activities through planning and building educational premises so that design and use are in alignment. From 2019 to 2022, she led an EU-funded initiative, CoReD (https://www.ncl.ac.uk/cored/), which developed a suite of user-friendly tools and other resourcces that can be used by school communities to evaluate and improve their educational environments.